Publications

November 2008 (Revised June 2009)
Case

Sole-Sourcing the Intel 386: A Company and Industry Transformed

By: Richard S. Tedlow and David Ruben

Intel's precedent-breaking decision not to second-source its groundbreaking 386 microprocessor in 1986 propelled Intel to new heights and fundamentally transformed the computer industry. View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Technological Innovation; Production; Information Infrastructure; Transformation; Brands and Branding; Product Development; Computer Industry; United States

May 2010 (Revised January 2014)
Case

Water Shortage and Property Investing in Mexico City

By: John D. Macomber, Regina Garcia-Cuellar and Griffin James

A commercial property company evaluates water risks including the government's ability to remedy, the company's operating exposure and mitigation, and whether to relocate because of water risk. A real estate fund manager assesses investment prospects in Mexico City in... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Investment; Risk Management; Infrastructure; Privatization; Business and Government Relations; Partners and Partnerships; Financial Services Industry; Real Estate Industry; Utilities Industry; Mexico City

April 2021
Supplement

Buy Online, Pickup in Store: Vice President of E-Commerce Supplement

By: Antonio Moreno, Santiago Gallino and Amy Klopfenstein

In April 2019, Sylvarella VP of E-Commerce Charla Limont must review an analysis of her department’s sales data to determine the impact of the company’s Buy Online, Pickup in Store (BOPS) program. The program implementation created significant problems for the... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Service Delivery; Logistics; Infrastructure; Distribution Channels; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Analysis; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; United States; Canada

November 2020 (Revised September 2021)
Case

HP Instant Ink: (Self) Disrupting the Consumer Printing Market

By: Elie Ofek, Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg and George Gonzalez

Seeking to disrupt the consumer printing market (before being disrupted by others), and in response to customer pain points, in 2013 HP Inc. launched an ink replenishment service called Instant Ink, where customers pay a monthly subscription fee based on the number of... View Details

Keywords: Printing; Ink; Subscription Model; Customers; Information Infrastructure; Service Delivery; Business Model; Disruption; Growth and Development Strategy

August 2013
Technical Note

Raising the Level of Abstraction

By: Willy Shih

This technical note discusses abstraction as a way of generalizing a process or component for wider application. By hiding complexity inside a module, abstraction enables system designers to think at a higher level. This lowers entry barriers to using (and reusing) a... View Details

Keywords: Abstraction; Modularity; Commercialization; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Digital Platforms; United States; Asia; Europe

27 Apr 2010
First Look

First Look: April 27

Collaborating with Competitors on Infrastructure Ranjay Gulati, Francisco de Asís Martínez-Jerez, V.G. Narayanan, and Rachna TahilyaniHarvard Business School Case 110-057 The case describes the formation of Indus Towers, the largest... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

20 Jul 2009
Research & Ideas

Markets or Communities? The Best Ways to Manage Outside Innovation

infrastructure to host the marketplace. The numbers are simply staggering: in the space of one year, over 50,000 applications and over 1 billion downloads. Apple has shown the way in how to build a market of external innovators. Of... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Technology

January 1998 (Revised March 1998)
Case

Staples (C)

By: Myra M. Hart, Marco Iansiti and Barbara Feinberg

The search for appropriate hardware and software to support the launch of a new large-scale retail operation forces the management team to define their goals at a very detailed level and to make all underlying assumptions explicit. View Details

Keywords: Goals and Objectives; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Business Startups; Management Teams; Retail Industry

16 Apr 2012
Research & Ideas

The Inner Workings of Corporate Headquarters

Physicists tell us entropy is the natural state of the world, and that law seems especially true in today's multidivisional company. "When you create organizational subunits of any form, they'll have a tendency to focus internally on their own things," says... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

April 2022
Teaching Note

Transforming BlackBerry: From Smartphones to Software

By: Ranjay Gulati and Eppa Rixey

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 421-052. View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Leadership; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Corporate Strategy; Technology Industry

Article

Applying KISS to Healthcare Information Technology

By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Margo Seltzer and Mark Gaynor

Current public and private healthcare information technology initiatives have failed to achieve secure integration among providers. Applying the "keep it simple, stupid" principle offers the key guidance for solving this problem. View Details

Keywords: Technology; Health Care; Public Health; Information Technology Industry; Computer Networks; Computer Services Industries; Software; Hardware; Medical Services; Health Care and Treatment; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Information Infrastructure; Standards; Health Industry; Technology Industry; United States

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07 Aug 2012
Research & Ideas

Off and Running: Professors Comment on Olympics

infrastructure make a case in point. The exorbitant cost of new structures, the limited number of opportunities for post-Games usage, and even the sometimes questionable quality of the construction are often lost in the excitement of... View Details

Keywords: Re: Multiple Faculty; Sports

17 Jan 2017
Research & Ideas

Can China Maintain Its Economic Power?

under way by the turn of the century, as millions of workers moved from the interior to new factories on the coast, leaving behind their families for 48 weeks a year. At the same time, they were building the massive transportation View Details

Keywords: by Deborah Blagg

February 2010 (Revised May 2010)
Case

Bardhaman (A): Shrachi and the West Bengal Housing Board

By: John D. Macomber and Viraal Balsari

A real estate developer decides whether to enter into a public private partnership with the government of West Bengal to develop a township on farmland. The decisions include whether to expand operations from the company's base in Kolkata to Bardhaman, 100 km away;... View Details

Keywords: Development Economics; Growth and Development Strategy; Business and Government Relations; Decisions; Private Equity; Design; Housing; Infrastructure; Projects; Real Estate Industry; West Bengal

March 2016 (Revised September 2021)
Case

South Africa: A Fractured Rainbow?

By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Haviland Sheldahl-Thomason

Twenty years after the end of Apartheid, South Africa's democracy persists, albeit with problems. A tripartite coalition — the African National Congress, the labor unions, and the Communist Party — still controls the political system but with diminishing economic... View Details

Keywords: Politics; Development; Productivity; Labor; Labor Unions; Infrastructure; Government and Politics; Economic Growth; Performance Productivity; Economy; Social Issues; South Africa

11 Jun 2020
In Practice

Are Digital Organizations Better at Overcoming COVID?

as the long-run winners, and those firms that count their future in decades, instead of months or years. Lauren H. Cohen is the L.E. Simmons Professor of Business Administration. Shane M. Greenstein: Robust infrastructure helps companies... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

26 Jun 2013
Op-Ed

A Roadmap for Afghanistan’s Economic Future

Uzbek energy and gas to India in particular. So, how can a job-creating infrastructure be created efficiently to reverse the country's precipitous decline? First, leverage existing successes. Roshan, for example, is a rags-to-riches... View Details

Keywords: by Tarun Khanna

2019
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 17 The Wintel Standards-based Platform

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

The purpose of this chapter is to use the theory of bottlenecks laid out in previous chapters to better understand the dynamics of an open standards-based platform. I describe how the Wintel platform evolved from 1990 through 2000 under joint sponsorship of Intel and... View Details

Keywords: Open Platforms; Bottlenecks; Wintel Platform; Disintermediation; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Business History; Digital Platforms; Computer Industry

SSRN

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July 2016 (Revised November 2018)
Case

Code.org

By: John J-H Kim, Lauren Barley and Allison M. Ciechanover

The case explores Hadi Partovi’s mission to provide every K-12 student in the United States the opportunity to learn computer science. Students can assess how Partovi transformed his passion into an organization that reached millions around the globe through the launch... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Education; Education Industry; United States